Mutant Town Rhapsody
by JDCorley
Summary: Twelve hours in Mutant Town history start here. Jake Cody's a hustler. Frankie Della Cava's a crimeboss. Both of them are after one thing. Money. The clock is ticking.
1. Last Kiss For Jake Cody

"Look, the first thing and the last thing you need to do is stay calm. You are in circumstances. That's what we call it. You're in circumstances up to your neck and you're standing on your head. Here's what you're going to do. Do exactly what I say and do not deviate from the plan or else you are not going to get out of this. I will handle this for you. I do this thing for you because of who you are associated with. You don't have to ask me any questions because anything you don't know you don't need to know and what you don't need to know you don't want to know. Now or ever. You just do what I say.

One. Take my car keys and this twenty dollar bill.

Two. Go into the kitchen and get four garbage bags and three grocery sacks.

Three. Put two of the grocery sacks on your hands.

Four. Put the gun in the third grocery sack and bring it to me.

Five. Wrap the body in the four garbage bags, A, left leg, B, right leg, C, left torso, D, right torso.

Six. Bring my car to the side door. Leave the engine running. Leave the door open.

Seven. Open the trunk.

Eight. Open the door and prop it as far open as you can.

Nine. Take the body and put it in the trunk of the car.

Ten. Remove the bags from your hands and put them in the trunk.

Eleven. Go to your car.

Twelve. Drive to the Metropol Movie Theater.

Thirteen. Buy a ticket for the 10:15 showing of "Three Pines" with the money I just gave you.

Fourteen. Buy popcorn with the change.

Fifteen. Go into the theater for "Stealth Force". The movie will have already started. Watch the movie. It will be over at 11:45.

Sixteen. Drive to the East Side Cafe and sit at the counter.

Eighteen. Order coffee. Smoke a cigarette. Pay with the change from the theater.

Nineteen. You will be met by someone you know. Make conversation. At twelve-forty-five, note the time out loud and mention a breakfast appointment. Go directly home, take a very thorough shower and put the towels, your washcloth, your clothes, the soap, and the stub for "Three Pines" in a garbage bag. Put the bag under your bed.

Twenty. Tomorrow afternoon I will come over at exactly three p.m. and give you a ticket stub for "Stealth Force" and take away the bag of clothes. Be sure you are alone at home at that point.

Twenty-one. If anyone asks you about this, ever, you were supposed to meet at the movies, but he never showed up. So you went to the movie. It was 'Stealth Force'. You went to a diner to see if he'd maybe meet you there, but instead you met someone else. You eventually gave up and went home and went to sleep.

You are going to make it through this and nobody needs to know about it. And nobody ever will know about it. But every day from now until the end of your life, you wake up in the morning and you say a prayer thanking Jesus, Mary and every saint you can remember for Mr. Frankie Della Cava because it is because of his association that I am doing this thing for you.

One."

* * *

**MUTANT TOWN RHAPSODY**

PART ONE - Last Kiss For Jake Cody

Twelve hours before Jake Cody was shot to death and wrapped in garbage bags, he was ambling down the street in Mutant Town cramming a hot dog into one mouth and talking on his cellphone with the other. Cody had two mouths, a distorted, long skinny face to contain them, his jaws working up and down, one mouth closing as the other opened, his neck distending as his two throats gulped around each other, one for air, one for food, "Food, baby, I gotta eat, a man's gotta eat." he said into the phone. "What you got for me?"

"VCRs, Code, I got VCRs, Jake baby. There was this truck..." said the voice on the phone. A high voice, it sang through the digital air clear and cool. Great reception on Jake Cody's stolen cellphone.

"I don't need to know from trucks, I need to know what you got."

"Sony 162-A's, never out of the box, only been dropped once." came the voice.

"I call you back." Jake Cody said. "Make it ready for ten o'clock tonight. I call you with where and how much."

"Delivery ten p.m." said the high voice.

Jake Cody had a girlfriend who was named Brittany Martin. Brittany Martin was a regular girl with big hips and thin lips and her genetic structure was such that the only mutant DNA in her body was what Jake Cody shot into her when they made love, which she preferred to do on the hood of Jake Cody's 1984 Subaru. She was on the pill and her mother told her she was going to hell for doing it with a mutant but what did her mother know about hell anyway. Jake met Brittany outside the City Diner when he had about eleven and a half hours to live. He walked up and gave her a kiss on the ear and the cheek at the same time. "Hey baby." he said.

"Hey Jake." she said. "What are you grinning about?"

"Because I got a sexy lady who's waiting for me in a afternoon sunbeam."

"You making money?" she guessed.

"I'm always making money." Jake Cody said. "Everybody's always making money, that New York City, baby, now give me a kiss."

She came into his arms. "High or low?" she said.

"High." he told her, and so she kissed his upper set of lips. There they stood on the front step of the diner, with cigarette butts in the gutter and yellow taxis streaming past, they couldn't change their colors just because they passed from the rest of New York City into Mutant Town.

Jake Cody was a good looking guy above his upper set of lips, his skin tanned and smooth under her fingers, his dark hair combed forward in moussed spikes, his Yankees hoodie unzipped and folded down, he wore it practical, down to earth, like his jeans, like his boots, a guy who works on his feet, works on his phone on his feet, so it looked good on him, he looked so very good, and Brittany wore pale blue scrubs like a nurse or a doctor even though all she did was wash old people and bedsheets at the nursing home five blocks over, she had a knockoff Prada purse that was obviously fake but felt good over her shoulder anyway, with her blond hair up in a high ponytail wrapped in a pink loop of fabric like a girl ten years younger, and kissing him she felt her heart pound and pound, this was her guy, this was going to be it, the love of her life, how the hell did she end up kissing a mutant and thinking maybe someday they'd be in a church, what church would have them, but she still thought about it, and loved every second of the heartbreak thinking about it caused her.

Now at that same time, Francis Della Cava, who ran Mutant Town for the Kingpin of crime, and who would eventually order a man to go and pick up Jake Cody's body, was being told about some hot VCRs that were just about to hit the street. When you're a mutant you can't get a credit card and you can't go to the big discount store and get one of the blue-vested high school kids to look at you, let alone help you, because you've got blue skin or two mouths like Jake Cody's got or colonies of insects inside your mouth, so when you need a VCR you get it from a guy, you get it from a guy who knows a guy, and the guy who knows a guy knows a guy, and maybe they get a VCR somewhere and pass it to each other and pass some money back and forth and every dollar they pass to each other, they pass a dime to Frankie Della Cava, who passes a nickel to the Kingpin of Crime, who doesn't come to Mutant Town because nobody else can squeeze the percentage out of a segregated mutant slum quite like Frankie and who would want to?

"Norton Pratt boosted a truckload of hot VCRs from a Jap freighter early this morning." said Isaiah to Frankie, who was eating pasta in a friend's kitchen. The friend was in the front room snorting cocaine that Frankie had been paid for, by the distributor, by the dealer, by the couriers, by everyone but the Colombians who had made it out of God knows what in a green healthy jungle far from New York City.

"Good man, Pratt." Frankie said pleasantly. "He paid?"

"He paid, but he passed it to Howler Annie." Isaiah said darkly. Isaiah had been born black but now he had orange stains and splotches that slowly moved across his skin like dripping paint or flowing water. If you touched them, they burned your fingers like acid. He went through a lot of clothes in a week. The last time he had gone to prison for Frankie Della Cava, he had wrestled another inmate to the floor of an exercise yard and held him there until his skin sloughed off the bone. Nobody mentioned the rumors that Isaiah was homosexual after that. This afternoon Isaiah had on a smooth black suit that didn't quite fit, and so he had long white cuffs protruding from his sleeves before the black skin of his hands, like little white cloth chunks of ice attached to the scorched darkness of the suit.

"That's a mistake on his part." Frankie said. "Howler Annie doesn't pay." Frankie was Frankie. He had a round face like a fat boy singing in the choir, and he wasn't small, but he was built like a little wrestler, five feet tall in his stocking feet, but built heavy and strong. He didn't have an obvious mutation, but a lot of people could guess from looking at him, like something in his face, or beady blue eyes, or big hands displayed the fatal twist of DNA that marked him as a mutant. Black hair thick and bushy, almost curly. He wore a tiki shirt, all gray and green and the collar spread out wide at his thick neck even though he kept the top two buttons loose. He wore sneakers and didn't need a gun to kill you any more than cholera or Satan does. "Howler Annie doesn't pay us shit."

"Howler Annie still hasn't finished paying for when she put three of our guys in the hospital two months ago." Isaiah mentioned.

"She could play ping-pong with their testicles for all I care if she would just cut us a fucking check afterwards." Frankie said meditatively. "Take care of it, Isaiah. If someone's moving it, they'll want to move it fast. We will want to make an arrangement about that." An arrangement is what Frankie called any sort of business, he liked the sound of the word, it was long and took a while to say, and it could mean shooting a guy or paying a guy a lot of money, so it was a flexible word, and unlike 'business' it didn't necessarily mean money, it could mean favors. Frankie liked to do favors for people and have favors done for him because he did not have to pay a nickel to the Kingpin of Crime for any favors he got. Favors were cheaper than money.

"I'll see what I can find out." Isaiah said calmly.


	2. Unwritten Rule

Unwritten Rule

Fade down the big kiss, fade down the kitchen sink drama, how did we get to Mutant Town? Mutant Town was made by one thing, the Genetic Housing Civil Reform Act of 1986, which had one purpose, namely giving the middle finger to the ACLU's Genetic Housing Equality Lawsuit Unit headed by a young charismatic black woman who was coming after the landlords of New York City with a smile, a spray of dreadlocks sticking off the back of her head, a discount-store grey suit, and a line of deformed mutant clients that would have stretched from One Federal Plaza to the Avengers Mansion. She might as well have been after the landlords with a meat axe for all that she made them felt felt trapped and desperate. They made calls. They had money. Someone had to invent something. What got invented was the Genetic Housing Civil Reform Act. The GHCRA was invented by Senator Robert Kelly and so in addition to being called Mutant Town and District X, the segregated slum where the only landlords who would rent to mutants could be found was also called Kellytown.

The New York Police Department shoved the Worst Of The Finest into Kellytown, crammed dirty cops under indictment and rookies who would never make it, jammed drunks with nightsticks and addicts with guns into the ugliest precinct house and gave them nothing, nothing with which to keep the peace other than the number one unwritten rule of the precinct:

CLOSED FUCKING BORDERS.

The second to last thing that any squarejohn citizen wanted to see was a mutant criminal out in their clean-gene city, and the last thing they wanted to see was a mutant victim. They had gone to all that trouble of making a cesspool for mutants to drown in, so the word came from the top, the very top regarding what they wished and what they would do to get what they wished and what they wished for Mutant Town was

CLOSED FUCKING BORDERS.

Officer Dennis Hill rode the subway in to work every morning in that Kellytown Precinct. Hill liked being in the NYPD. He liked the uniform, he liked the cop bars, he liked the gun, the nightstick and the taser, and he loved, loved, loved, taking money from people. Hill was big, he had played football in high school, in college, he was going to go somewhere, then he got hit once the wrong way and something went pop in his back and that was that. He had black skin, dark black, Africa black, big lips, shaved his head, he liked that he scared people by being a big black guy in New York City.

Officer Hill liked to scare people almost as much as he liked taking money from people, which made his favorite hobby extortion and his second favorite hobby blackmail. Hill got off the subway and came into the precinct that afternoon, late, after sampling the best to discover a printout stuck to the duty board detailing the theft at three a.m. of a truck full of VCRs which had just been offloaded down at the docks. They found the truck with no VCRs at ten-thirty this morning inside Mutant Town meaning that the brass now officially didn't give a shit what happened to the VCRs at least until they crossed the

CLOSED FUCKING BORDERS

again into the real New York City. Hill took a newspaper from the stand without paying, he never paid for anything on the street and if he ever was asked to, he would rap them on the mouth with the nightstick and say there's your payment asshole, now get back to work. He read the newspaper from front to back and decided he wanted Mets tickets, so he would need some money for Mets tickets, so he would find these VCRs and get himself a piece of the money to look the other way. He went to find a guy who might know. He found the guy who might know and he did know. So he went looking for Pratt, who had gotten the truck and driven it here and unloaded it for someone but nobody knew who.

Pratt was with his asshole buddies yucking it up in a strip club, eating shitty strip club hamburgers and waving singles at the bored half-naked girls. Hill walked up and kicked Pratt hard in the side of the face with his big black boot and before Pratt could react to the feeling of the concrete floor hitting him on the other side of the head, Hill dragged Pratt half off his feet and hit Pratt's ugly face into the bar. Then he dragged him into the hallway behind the bar and said, "Hi, Pratt. How much did you get for the VCRs?"

Pratt didn't say anything, he was flailing his arms around and screaming and crying. Norton Pratt was an ugly sonofabitch with scarred scaly gray skin and he always dressed in red, it was the only color he could see any shades of with his beady lizard eyes like black marbles in their sockets, he could see blood red and rose red and salsa red and valentine red and police light red and G-string red but everything else in the world was the same ugly gray as his ugly skin.

"Shut up." Hill said. "Shut your ugly face, Pratt. Shut up." He hit Pratt against the wall. Someone had written "morlocks live" on the wall with a black marker. Pratt shut up. "Listen carefully. You want to get hit again?"

"No." mumbled Pratt.

"No, you don't want to get hit again." Hill hit him again. Then again. "Now how much did you get for the VCRs?"

"Three grand." mumbled Pratt.

"How much went up the chain?" Hill demanded. Someone had written "6 TITS TINA 555-1821" on the wall in green marker.

"Three hundred." mumbled Pratt.

"Della Cava's guy?"

"Sure." Pratt said, like it didn't matter.

"Who'd you sell to?"

"I tell you, you let me walk?" Pratt said. Hill hit him against the wall three times, and the floor once. Pratt screamed. Hill kicked him in the crotch. Pratt screamed again and rolled over. His hand flailed at the stained concrete.

"Who'd you sell to?" Hill demanded, and put his boot on Pratt's forehead.

"Asshole. I sold to Howler Annie. You're an asshole." whined Pratt.

Hill leaned over and got Pratt's wallet out of his pocket and took five fifty dollar bills out of it, which he put into his own pocket. He kicked Pratt again and sneered at him. Outsde the sun was shining. It was going to be a good day.


End file.
